December 2004: It was raining on the platform on 19th avenue across from SF state. There weren’t too many people waiting, telling me I had just missed the outbound M. Amazingly enough, though, there was another coming in about two minutes. Not enough time to pull out a magazine. And plus, it was a windy rain, and the platform roof wouldn’t have done much to protect the pages.
I noticed only one other rider on my end of the platform: an Asian guy with a football team’s baseball hat. Maroon. 49ers. Very everyday San Francisco.

We boarded the M, shoes squeaking in that way that they do only on rainy days inside a Muni train. I sat down and he took his seat in the row directly in front of me. No one else was on in the front of the train where we were.

A couple of stops later, now in Oceanview, two young women got on. They seemed to be SF State students as well, but not your mid-career, second-degree type. No, they were young. If I had to guess, I’d say 19, maybe 20.

Okay, bear with me while I post a couple of years-old stories from aboard Muni. Here’s the first:

March 2006: As I stood waiting for the 22 at 16th and Mission, I noticed a somewhat attractive woman approach the stop. A couple minutes later, the bus arrived, and seeing as how there were only a couple of other boarders besides myself, I kindly let this woman get on first.

I stood patiently behind her as she approached the fare machine, and she had some kind of words with the driver. I couldn’t quite make out what she said, but I did notice that she neglected to pay.

She turned and started walking back on a medium-filled coach. She took a couple of steps away from the machine, and as she did, I stepped up. With people behind me waiting to get on still standing outside the bus, I was doing my best to keep the flow of bus traffic moving steadily along.

What started in 2004 in a journalism class at San Francisco State University has now found its way, four years later, to the internet.

The idea wasn’t mine, originally, but was intended to be part of a magazine that covered San Francisco culture, neighborhood by neighborhood, with a very youthful slant. My co-editor Eugenia gets all the credit for Muni Diaries as an idea. Together, we decided it’s way cheaper and easier to do a website than to start a magazine from the ground-up. We brought a programmer/designer type on board, and had us an alpha site for a while.

Then we all got jobs.

A few years later, as blogging has taken off and become so easy that moms and dads the world over are doing it, I had the idea to just hatch this thing as a WordPress blog, and let it grow organically.

The idea is to create a forum specifically for anything having to do with public transportation in San Francisco. We’re gonna try to keep BART out of it (hint: we own bartdiaries.com, which may or may not launch soon, depending on the success of this site), and stick exclusively to:

Stories of riding and waiting for Muni buses, light rails, and cable cars

So please, feel free to contribute, comment, and tell your friends that they have a forum to talk with others about their experiences on San Francisco’s hated, yet loved public transportation system. – Jeff